Ex parte Endo
| Ex parte Endo | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Argued October 12, 1944 Decided December 18, 1944 |
|
| Full case name | Ex parte Mitsuye Endo |
| Citations | 323 U.S. 283 (more) |
| Holding | |
| The government cannot detain a citizen without charge when the government itself concedes she is loyal to the United States. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Douglas, joined by unanimous court |
| Concurrence | Murphy |
| Concurrence | Roberts |
Ex parte Endo, or Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944), was a United States Supreme Court ex parte decision handed down on December 18, 1944, in which the Justices unanimously ruled that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was "concededly loyal" to the United States. Although the Court did not touch on the constitutionality of the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast—which they had, contradictorily, found not to violate citizen rights in their Korematsu v. United States decision on the same date—the Endo ruling nonetheless led to the reopening of the West Coast to Japanese Americans after their incarceration in camps across the U.S. interior during World War II.
The Court also found as part of this decision that, if Congress is found to have ratified by appropriation any part of an executive agency program, the bill doing so must include a specific item referring to that portion of the program.
Mitsuye Endo, the plaintiff in the case, had worked as a clerk for the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento prior to the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor soured public sentiment toward Japanese Americans, Endo and other Nisei state employees were harassed and eventually fired because of their Japanese ancestry. Civil rights attorney and then-president of the Japanese American Citizens League Saburo Kido, with San Francisco attorney James Purcell, began a legal campaign to assist these workers, but the mass removal authorized by Executive Order 9066 in early 1942 complicated their case. Endo was selected as a test case to file a writ of habeas corpus because of her profile as an Americanized, "assimilated" Nisei: a practicing Christian who had never been to Japan, spoke only English and no Japanese, and had a brother in the U.S. Army.
...
Wikipedia